Many Happy Returns
by productionsoftime
Summary: It was Murphy's birthday and for once, I had a plan. It wasn't a good plan- let's not say that. It didn't involve flowers or balloons or people shouting, "Surprise!" all at once when the lights came on. You just don't do that to a woman as quick on the draw as Murph. It ain't safe.


So I just finished reading Jim Butcher's series (what's been published so far). I had so much fun reading that I wasn't happy about saying goodbye to Harry Dresden. Writing my own Dresden adventure seemed like a great way to express my appreciation of Butcher's work and dive back into the fictional world he created. So I've started. I think Butcher's a funny writer, great with keeping the plot moving (Things Happening, all the time), and I'm fascinated by his portrayal of morality, choice, purpose- his philosophy, I guess. So those are the things I'll be trying to emulate/reproduce. Harry's voice is singular, tough to get right without going overboard. I'm just going to give it my best and have fun doing it.

If you want to review and let me know what you think, I won't complain.

More chapters to follow.

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Many Happy Returns - Chapter One

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It was Murphy's birthday and for once, I had a plan.

It wasn't a good plan- let's not say that. It didn't involve flowers or balloons or people shouting, "Surprise!" all at once when the lights came on. (You just don't do that to a woman as quick on the draw as Murph. It ain't safe.)

As Chicago's resident wizard, I suppose I could've come up with something spectacular. Something in the order of those airplane tricks that spell words in the sky. Of course, I wouldn't need the airplane and the words I chose would probably earn an MPAA rating, but you get my point. There are advantages to having a metric shit-ton of magical energy at your disposal and not all of them have to do with not-dying while defending your city from things that go bump in the night. Some of the advantages of being a wizard are perfectly superfluous. They could help you plan something cool for your friend's birthday.

Myself, I'm not big on them. Birthdays, that is. It comes from growing up as an orphan: you learn pretty quickly not to get your hopes up over any event Hallmark sponsors. (It also has something to do with the fact that I was born on Halloween, when the walls between the world and the Nevernever are at their thinnest- and most dangerous.)

But my own hang-ups aren't the reason I didn't go for magical hoopla. I didn't go for it because I know Murph, and she's not big on fanfare. (Seriously. Get her going about parades sometime. Be sure to clear your schedule.)

She's so not big on fanfare that I didn't even try to involve the usual, non-magical suspects: presents, colorful streamers, cake. My plan incorporated the three basic necessities: beer, pizza, and not getting our asses kicked by supernatural threat nouveau- and really, what more can you ask for without tempting the universe to step in and teach you a little humility?

As it turns out, I should have stopped at beer and pizza.

If things had gone according to plan, at six-thirty I would have been politely knocking on the front door to Murphy's cute house.

(I've been strictly forbidden from calling Murphy's house cute, but who is she kidding? The place is gingerbread, Thomas-Kinkade, look-kids-it's-your-favorite-grandma cute. Murphy is one of Chicago's toughest, but her neighborhood just... isn't. Sprightly green lawns, potted marigolds and matching mailboxes, decks with solar-powered tiki lights. That sort of thing.)

The plan was: I knock on her door, Murphy answers her door. Then I was going to offer a witty greeting (and it's me, so it would have been very witty- perhaps something along the lines of "Hiya, Murph"), make droll reference to her height or lack thereof, slip in a Happy Birthday, and ask permission for me and my pizza and my bottles of McAnally's dark to enter.

Complicated, I know, but I would have handled it. Too bad I never got past the sidewalk.

The blast came suddenly, without sound, without warning. One second I was pausing to juggle the pizza box and the beer, the next I was thirty yards away, hurling across the neighbors' lawn and plowing through their flower beds. (I mean plowing, too. I left a furrow.) The initial impact with the ground knocked the wind out of me and then physics being a hard science, I began tumbling, end over end, destroying some lovely hydrangeas before the broad side of a set of very solidly wooden porch steps halted my progress. If I hadn't been wearing my handy-dandy spell-protected duster, things would have been far messier and considerably less pleasant. As it was, things still weren't pretty.

For a long second, I just lay there, gasping. It seemed like as good a time as any to work on my fish-out-of-water imitation. My left shoulder screamed at me that something was definitely, seriously not right. Then that numb-shock feeling, the precursor to pain, began to spread through my back, my butt, my face, my knees- just about everywhere, really. Pain and adrenaline raced for my attention. The air was full of the smell of mulch and there was blood in my mouth, warm and salty. (Amateur, I know, but I have this bad habit of biting my tongue whenever someone unexpectedly hurls me through the air with the speed and force usually present in monster truck shows.)

I was aware, in a vague, not-right-now sort of way, that my plan for Murph's birthday was not unfolding as intended, but my poor, dazed, little wizard's brain was still working out whether I should have chosen Hawaiian instead of Meat Lovers. My lungs struggled to restart manually. Honestly, I didn't actually work out what had happened until I heard the sound of the McAnally's bottles shattering.

I went from stunned to furious faster than you could say, "Murphy likes plain cheese, idiot." You simply do not- you just_ DO NOT- _waste Mac's beer like that. And yeah, technically I had been the one to drop the bottles, but let's see you hold on to a six-pack when the magical equivalent of the Grave Digger slams you in the back and sends you tumbling ass over elbows across Chicagoland suburbia. Someone was trying to kill me. Someone had just ruined six perfectly good beers. I'm not quite sure which one pissed me off more.

With my right arm, I pushed myself, staggering, to my feet. I was still trying and failing to get my lungs to remember what it was they usually did with oxygen. Standing hurt. It _really_ hurt, but then, hurt is getting to be a pretty regular state of being for me. When I say I could write the book on pain, I'm not overestimating by much. I may not be a heavyweight when it comes to plumbing the depths of agony- not like Mab's erstwhile Winter Knight, Lloyd Slate, was- but the sheer breadth and variety of my experiences have got to be worth something. Wizards, they're famous scribblers. All of those spell books and grimoires, the hidden tomes, the dusty volumes. Who says I, Harry Dresden, couldn't cobble together my own lasting literary legacy? A testament to all my wizardly wisdom, so - a light read. What about a bathroom companion? A motley collection of quick and dirty tips. Working title: Wizarding Whatnots.

So here it is, Wizarding Whatnot #1: You can be fairly certain something isn't right with one or all of your limbs when fighting your way out of a crushed hydrangea bush seems like real work.

In getting to my feet I discovered that my left shoulder had chosen to stop communicating with my brain. It was just my luck, then, that I wear my most reliable means of magical defense- my trusty shield bracelet- on my left wrist. I got the shield up and into place in time to block the second blast of energy, but only by grabbing my left wrist and hauling on it with my right hand. Which hurt- a lot- which meant dislocation, possibly worse. The bracelet was fairly new, a fresh twist on an old classic, and where before a transparent, pale blue barrier would have stood between me and whatever had come out of the dark to say, "Boo," now a swirling, silvery wall slammed into place. It deflected the oncoming attack with a crackle of yellow sparks, sending it zinging up into the evening sky. Up there, only seriously unlucky pigeons would be in danger of catching the rebound.

Call animal control, I dare you.

I still had no idea what was attacking me, or why, or where the threat was coming from- and before I'd taken more than a few wobbly steps across Murphy's neighbor's lawn, three more blasts had crashed against my shield in terrifyingly quick succession. It wasn't good. It was so very not good.

When I teach new Wardens, young wizards of the White Council sworn to enforce its laws and protect the unprotected, I outline a neat, four-part approach to magical threats. I call it the four As: Ascertain, Analyze, Assemble, Act. But, as I tell my students, when getting clobbered by magical attacks of unknown origin with all the delay of a fully automatic- which is to say, none- I fully endorse adding a very important fifth A: Amscray.

I headed for Murphy's house- and the wards I'd installed around it- in an embarrassing hurry. I'm a good runner; I train for it and when it comes to hauling ass, my long stork's legs actually make themselves useful. Give me an open road and a pair of comfortable shoes, and I could probably give your average Jamaican twelve-year-old a run for his money. However, fighting a ripening concussion, trying to hold my dislocated shield arm in place- and as immobile as agony demanded- while I frantically scanned the neighborhood to catch the license on the magical truck that hit me, I wouldn't have given most turtles a run for their money.

Another blast rammed my shield, tipping me into a stumble for several feet. Fear- held at bay by general confusion and rising adrenaline- snarled to life in my gut. Generally speaking, I'm no daisy. If I can get my shield up, I can usually hold off all but the really Big Nasties: high-level fae and demons, demi-gods, the more powerful black magic users. Maintaining heavy-duty defense costs energy sure, and quite a bit, but the other guy (or gal, as it were) is expending just as much energy on manufacturing an offense. And I can usually get some disruptive shots in, in the meantime. Magical duels are sometimes as simple a matter as who can exhaust or distract who first. The big problem with that? I wasn't, as far as I could tell, actually having a magical duel. There was no one. Not a soul in sight. And yet. Two more blasts shattered against my shield from different directions, nearly blinding me with a dizzying kaleidoscope of sparks. My shield bracelet had accelerated in temperature from warmed-by-the-sun hot to fresh-out-of-the-oven burning. I gritted my teeth and tottered past Murphy's front hedges.

I was being ambushed by something with the magical punch and hustle of an assault rifle and the maneuverability of a team of Imperial Probe Droids. Oh, and did I mention the veiling skill of one of the fae? So not good, so very not good. I've made a rather large number of enemies in my day and a lot of them are pretty freakin' freaky. (This fact either depresses or heartens me, depending on my mood and whether or not I'm late for the rent that month.)This, however, was an entirely new kind of assault. I don't like new. And all you have to do is take a look at my car, my coat, or my apartment to know: I don't appreciate change. Call me a Philistine if you want, a neurotic fogy, a hidebound fossil- I'll deserve it. But sometimes, I have a real point.

I reached Murph's front steps, braced my hips against one section of the little side rail, and turned to face the quiet, empty, and disturbingly lethal neighborhood scene. On either side of the deserted road, cars sat as they had a minute ago, placidly, in rows. Sidewalks still connected houses. Houses still stood behind large green lawns. Tree leaves swayed in the soft, evening breeze. Yellow light seeped from prettily curtained windows.

I drew in a shallow, wheezing breath. I gathered my fury, my will, my years of hard-earned knowledge, and fashioned from them a clever strategy for uncovering the identity of my enemy. I opened my mouth and shouted, "Show yourself, you fat coward!"

I had barely gotten through "fat" when four more blasts of energy crashed into my shield, one after the other so quickly that they might have been simultaneous for all the difference it made to my defense. The first three I handled. But the fourth, well. I did say I had planned to knock on Murphy's door at six-thirty, did I not?

As it happened, I was only five or six minutes late when I knocked firmly on Murphy's door. With my head.

Things get a little muzzy after that.

I assume only a few seconds had passed when Murphy answered the door. You tend to move a little faster than normal when two-hundred pounds of wizard collide with your front door at high speed. I suspect the noise it created rated somewhere between water buffalo and teenage hippopotamus.

I do remember seeing Murph's face above mine, watching her transition from pissed off to concerned to terrified-but-not-showing-it. She had on make-up, I think- her eyes were oddly sparkly. I was having a hell of a time focusing on the wards long enough to disarm them, but I must have, and Murphy must have dragged me inside, because then I was staring at her crown molding and she was asking far too many questions all at once. I tried to apologize about the door. (It had fared better than I did- but not by much.) I tried to explain about the beer.

After that things dimmed for a while, but the next memory I have can't be but a handful of seconds later. I was still in the foyer, still lying on my back, and Murphy held the side of my face with one hand and was using the other hand to slap me. My jumbled brain first concluded that she was upset- justifiably- about Mac's wasted brew. I believe I tried for another apology. And then my flickering brain cells came together long enough for me to register Murphy's words: "C'mon, Dresden. The wards. You've got to get the wards up. You with me? Remember the wards? If you don't want us to both die, do the wards."

I groaned.

Murphy slapped me- okay, it was more of a firm pat- again. "Remember not wanting to die? C'mon. You hear me? You can pass out after, promise."

I lifted my right hand- a Herculean effort, at the time- and gripped her wrist. "Pinkie?" I asked.

"Jesus, Dresden." Murphy held up her hand where I could see it- making a fist and extending her pinky finger straight out. "Pinkie promise. Now, look." She lifted my hand off her wrist and placed it flat against the wall to my right, just a foot away. She kept her hand over mine, holding it in place. Which was just as well, because I'd never have been able to hold it up on my own. "Here," she said. "Focus, here. I don't want to panic you, but we're on something of a tight schedule. Hurry up and do your thing."

I was confused, and terrified, and flirting pretty heavily with unconsciousness, and these do not a recipe for focus and calm make. "Thing?" I asked. "What thing?"

"Harry. The wards. Right about now would be great." Murphy kept one hand on mine, and the other hand on the side of my face. Her skin was warm, solid and comforting, and her voice steady. But these weren't what did it, in the end. It was her face, slowly draining of color, her eyes wide and locked on the door.

I closed my eyes, babbled something that might have been words, and performed the little spell needed to restore the wards. When I opened my eyes, Murphy was visibly slumping in relief.

I smiled at her, somewhat lopsidedly. Then I passed out.

Murphy kept her promise. She let me.


End file.
